Earlier quoted context omitted.
But upgrading HVAC systems is far more effective.
Sure but is it realistic, especially in the short term?
It's been nearly two years and COVID is likely not going away.
Surgical masks reduce Covid-19 spread, large-scale Stanford study shows
171–180 of 235 posts
Re: Surgical masks reduce Covid-19 spread, large-scale Stanford study shows
#172Its interesting that the article do not mention a rather interesting finding in the study. For the age groups of Why aren't masks effective to reduce the spread for that age group? The discussion part of the study don't explore it. Is the distancing behavior of people aged 50 or higher different than those below? I would like to see further studies being done on the younger demographic in order to explain why the dat…
> Why aren't masks effective to reduce the spread for that age group?
This is a good question and I think it is an important one since the title implies a different situation than what was actually tested.
So the 11% reduction was due to an effort to increase mask wearing compliance by means of...
> Providing free masks, informing people about the importance of covering both the mouth and nose, reminding people in-person when they were unmasked in public, and role-modeling by community leaders
It's probably not that masks are less effective on people under 50, but that the information campaign was less effective at influencing that group to wear their masks.
Also, the results are interesting:
> The observers found that just over 13% of people in the villages that received no interventions wore a mask properly, compared with more than 42% of people in the villages where each household received free masks and in-person reminders to wear them.
It seems that there is much more progress that can be made in getting people to wear masks. And we still don't know how effective 95%+ compliance will be at reducing the spread.
Finally, the report does note that villages provided with cloth masks had worse outcomes than those who were provided with surgical masks.
Re: Surgical masks reduce Covid-19 spread, large-scale Stanford study shows
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That number will be much higher since as you said a number of people didn't/don't comply at a societal level. ...or it will be lower. The study confounds the effects of distancing and mask-wearing. Distancing was higher in the surgical mask cohort. Also, as others note, the confidence interval for the surgical mask group overlaps zero. You can't rule out that the observed effect is due to chance.
From the study: >The intervention increased proper mask-wearing from 13.3% in control villages (N=806,547 observations) to 42.3% in treatment villages (N=797,715 observations)... Physical distancing increased from 24.1% in control villages to 29.2% in treatment villages Mask wearing increased 218% while distancing increased by 21%. I agree this is not proof specifically about masks, the study is about specific public…
I think it's also important to note that there was no change in physical distancing seen in indoor environments (mosques) - maybe due to the fact that it's obviously easier to spread out when outdoors. I think we are fairly confident by now that the vast majority of spread occurs indoors [1].
Re: Surgical masks reduce Covid-19 spread, large-scale Stanford study shows
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
As far as schools are concerned, Delta is a completely different virus. Outbreaks appear to be much more common in the US this fall with Delta, compared to this spring before Delta became the dominant strain. It's difficult to make long term comparisons and draw definitive conclusions when the mutations are great between semesters.
The Delta variant is more contagious so there is a higher rate of infections, but it's not a completely different virus. Symptoms in children are no more severe than with earlier variants. "Among all hospitalized children and adolescents with COVID-19, the proportions with indicators of severe disease (such as intensive care unit [ICU] admission) after the Delta variant became predominant (June 20–July 31, 2021) were…
I don't disagree, that is why I added a qualifier immediately before my statement about Delta.
Re: Surgical masks reduce Covid-19 spread, large-scale Stanford study shows
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you share a link for $1 N95's? That's better than I've seen. I've already moved to this approach myself, it's an increase in cost that I'll gladly take for increased protection. Just waiting for government and businesses in the US to catch up. It was definitely hard to find the good stuff at first - and I was much more reclusive as a result too - but yeah, things have changed. I wish people wouldn't respond to…
Costco "non-duckbill" N95 are $1.50 currently. They have the duckbill/fold-flat N95-ish kind for $0.60.
We recently got a set of those for Back to School, and have been fairly happy with them. Previously we had gotten from, IIRC, "maskhq" which had a comment reply ~18 months ago from the guy running it, the big thing there was authenticity traceable back to factory. They were ~$1ea. Can't seem to find the site now, maybe it has gone away.
Re: Surgical masks reduce Covid-19 spread, large-scale Stanford study shows
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's surprising to me that cloth masks can't even do the 11% of surgical masks. Which isn't much, but surgical masks are non-optimal for many reasons. Not to mention that this doesn't seem the same as "while wearing a surgical mask you only get 11% increase in protection" but is a population-level thing. There was still non-compliance that presumably lowered the efficacy. I would've intuitively guessed that the bette…
> The great incoherent idiocy of anti-* Americans on the issue of masks has always been that they say "cloth masks are ineffective" and propose a solution of "do nothing" instead of "get effective masks." I think the "no nothing" solution has more to do with a desire to return to normal than it is a refusal to "get effective masks" and just wear them forever or until some agency says not to anymore. There is a valid…
I mostly agree. The problem is mostly with populations that have a large number of un-vaccinated people. If we could separate those unvaccinated people from the vaccinated people then the vaccinated people could go back to normal and I agree the impact is probably small (not quite sure about "mild disease you get once in a while" but something we could live with). However when you have a 50/50 mix of people who have mild disease you get in a while and people who get a serious disease that leads to hospitalizations and death at a relatively high rate you now have a problem. And it's a problem for the vaccinated 50% who would not be able to get into the hospital when they have a medical emergency, or can't get their scheduled medial procedure done, or bearing the costs associated with those other 50%, or even just having a higher likelihood of getting sick with something they obviously prefer not to get (mild or not).
So the governments are optimizing for this (forcing us to do X) ... not for the individual but for public health and public (general) concerns. Just like they're forcing us (and fining us, darn!) not to drive through red lights, or exceed the speed limit. Are they always doing a great job? nope, but hey we voted for those guys (at least in functioning democracies)...
So here we are.
Re: Surgical masks reduce Covid-19 spread, large-scale Stanford study shows
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
As far as schools are concerned, Delta is a completely different virus. Outbreaks appear to be much more common in the US this fall with Delta, compared to this spring before Delta became the dominant strain. It's difficult to make long term comparisons and draw definitive conclusions when the mutations are great between semesters.
The Delta variant is more contagious so there is a higher rate of infections, but it's not a completely different virus. Symptoms in children are no more severe than with earlier variants. "Among all hospitalized children and adolescents with COVID-19, the proportions with indicators of severe disease (such as intensive care unit [ICU] admission) after the Delta variant became predominant (June 20–July 31, 2021) were…
At least for the children too young to be vaccinated, the Delta variant might as well be a completely different virus.
Previous versions of Covid were unlikely to infect children below puberty at all.
>More kids were hospitalized with Covid-19 this month than any other time this past year -- proving how seriously the Delta variant can hit any age group.
Between August 20 and 26, an average of 330 children were admitted to hospitals every day with Covid-19, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"This virus that we're dealing with now is a game changer," said Dr. Mark Kline, physician-in-chief of Children's Hospital New Orleans.
"It's just so easily transmitted from person-to-person." As of August 9, he said, "half of the children that we've admitted have been under the age of 2."
https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/31/health/covid-delta-variant-ch...
Re: Surgical masks reduce Covid-19 spread, large-scale Stanford study shows
#178Its interesting that the article do not mention a rather interesting finding in the study. For the age groups of Why aren't masks effective to reduce the spread for that age group? The discussion part of the study don't explore it. Is the distancing behavior of people aged 50 or higher different than those below? I would like to see further studies being done on the younger demographic in order to explain why the dat…
did you check that the number of counted infections in ages < 50 is enough to get statistical significance per whatever criteria in the study?
Re: Surgical masks reduce Covid-19 spread, large-scale Stanford study shows
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
yes, distancing does most of the work in most common situations. a mask can only work when conversing closely for a time indoors. otherwise masks do nothing, no matter the filtration rate of the mask, because there's nothing to filter in the first place. distancing is a more universal and sensible mitigation (we're distanced from nearly all of the world population all the time). this is why mask mandates, as currentl…
Aren't you sharing air with others in any common indoors space? I thought that was the whole aerosols debate that's basically settled by now, i.e. virus can stay suspending in the air for extended periods. With the Delta variant's characteristics this is also a much bigger problem (i.e. the same indoor space that might have been ok is no longer ok). There were early studies with the less infectious variants that show…
no, it's not "settled science" like that. the virus must traverse a gauntlet of death before reaching your juicy mucus membranes, including dessication and all manner of external forces that will inactivate it in the meantime. it falls apart in droves outside the body. you need constant exposure to warm, moist, infected exhaust so that the virus has trillions of chances of taking hold in your respiratory system, and it likely takes millions of virus particles making it across for enough to survive the immune response gauntlet inside the body. that a few virus particles in controlled tests miraculously manage to exist for a few minutes in the air has no bearing on real-world transmission rates.
that's why a mask can work (better than distancing) in that one particular situation, but distancing is a better general mitigation.
by the way, those early "studies" on long indoor spread were conjecture-based (e.g., using models), not rigorous science, and have failed to replicate.
Re: Surgical masks reduce Covid-19 spread, large-scale Stanford study shows
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
At the end of the day if the reduction is 11%, even if that works (because that reduce by 11%) that is still useless in order to control the epidemic. Unless we find 10 measures like that. But what they show is probably not the same that the impact of mask mandate or an `always wear mask` at the personal level. So not much is applicable about that study. Only that mask kind of reduce covid spread
You are making a number of pretty common errors: no anti-viral measure is going to be perfect, it is always going to be a layercake and an 11% improvement can make a huge difference because for one it might tip the balance from 1.05 to 0.95 which is the difference between a spreading disease and one that is on the return and because these percentages are multiplicative, not additive, so it would not take '10 measures…
I didn't come up to the number 10 because 10 * 11% is about 100%. its just a random guess about small impact measure
We know that R of covid in a naive environment is probably more than 4. So any group of measure that dont reduce it 1 is not going to be enough. There is no 1.05 in reality for covid. When you are at 1.05 it is already because of group of measures are in place